(UN)DONE DE/NEGOTIATING is conceived as vessel, a performance-based, object-producing, (auto-)theoretical writing- and work-cycle that investigates the resistant potential of the des assimilating historically marginal body knowledge in movement.
It aims at developing different textual vocabularies for deconstructing naturalized performative notions of normativity through interventions grounded in embodied practices such as small gestures, choreographed immediacies, repetitive unraveling of codes, de-accelerations, and sensuality deriving from the body as locus of already existent knowledge.
Through intertextuality in transdisciplinary research, the project is held within a container of intervention, where verbal, drawn and gestural text are considered equally.
During the PhD, I desire to approximate via textual and discursive somatopolitical fictions and theories of selves (n. self) – in the Preciadoan sense[1] – what Hélène Cixous postulated as “écriture féminine[2]”, a writing from the body. Instead of inscribing the feminine in any naturalized way, I engage with Cixous’ text and expand it with contemporary critical theories. The works are ‘written’ from historically undervalued bodies and conducted vis-à-vis site-engaging historical, embodied and theoretical research.
Doing negotiation points to the performative act and underlines the labor involved in negotiating history, social relations of sub/ordination and subalternity in relation to normativity – particularly, if one’s subjectivity is marked outside of hegemonic personhood. Undoing negotiating is the active decision not-to-negotiate. In this way, rest is thought of as a political and hence ‚active‘ act.
With the often lacking ‘luxury’ of time, I want to allow a substantial part of my work to take the space of conscious development of gesture, pose and intervention in groups using the form of score and rehearsal as chances to develop methods for togetherness and gathering in movement not bound to professionalized skill. This work imagines a temporary community, a way to hold and be held in attending to one’s own somatic knowledges.
